With the increased usage of the Internet comes the problem of deciding how and where to direct the information from the provider's point of view. With the advent of so-called "push" systems in which providers have direct access to the PC at the client side in a client/server application, it is increasingly important that the provider be provided with information so as to be able to direct the services to those users who are most likely to be interested.
In the past, the only type of demographic information that was available was to "guess" the usage of the system through use of sampling research data. In systems in which sampling research data is involved, a given research company will ask a major provider how many pieces of software were sold to the various users. Based on the data of the sales of the enabling software, the research company, utilizing mathematical techniques, provides demographic information to the provider based on a series of assumptions about the user.
However, the utilization of statistics alone based on the sales of software, for example, is not at all accurate in terms of providing the provider with targeted information as to the "real" demography of the user or client. For instance, it is impossible through statistics alone based on a single input such as sales to derive information relating to the CPU size and speed at the user, hard disk space availalle, information relating to the network connection such as dial-up cable modem connection information and ISDN connections, a list of the inventories indicating the applications running on the particular computer involved, as well as peripherals such as sound cards connected to the computer at the client side. Moreover, there is no way to ascertain the log-in history for each of the Internet users, such that critical information for the providers is not existent.
Critical information which is not available from traditional research is infrastructure information for a particular PC, such as CPU power, viewer, sound card and Internet connection information.
What is meant by the term "viewer" is what type of protocol is being run on the machine such as MPEG, QUICKTIME, AVI, and PDF.
The sum total of this infrastructure information would be useful for the decision maker at the provider as to decide whether or not, for instance, it is worth the money to make 3 megabytes of MPEG video available for advertising based on the above infrastructure demography. Thus, it is impossible for this decision maker to ascertain whether the Internet advertisement delivery will be efficient and worth enough to justify the cost, much less, for instance, providing an Internet video advertisement, the cost of which must be justified by assuring a number of targeted viewers for the subject matter of the video advertisement.